As any women's magazine editor will tell you, the surest way to generate controversy is to run a story about working mothers opting out or at-home mothers opting in.
Both working moms and at home moms feel dissed by each other (and the media), so no matter what is published or aired, you can be sure someone is going to be upset by it.
So, it is perhaps no surprise that soccer moms are the subject of two new novels, Nancy Star’s Carpool Diem, and Meg Wolitzer's The Ten Year Nap, an off-Broadway show, Secrets of a Soccer Mom, an upcoming movie, Soccer Mom, and a new reality show, The Secret Life of A Soccer Mom.

"This show is terrible because it TEMPTS a mother who has been at home with her children to leave them for her dream job!"
"Unless you're about to starve there is no reason for you to be at work. If you didn't want to raise your children, you should not have had them. It's child abandonment."

On the show, a “soccer mom” is secretly set up with her dream job for a week while her husband and children think she is enjoying a week at a spa. Then, drum roll please, the family learns the truth and Mom must make the big decision: Should she follow her career dreams or stay at home?
When I sat down to watch an episode, I expected to see the usual highly scripted unreality that passes as reality programming these days. But watching the episode in which a frumpy mother of four (and wife of a police officer) spent time as a cadet and performed so well she was offered a scholarship to the police academy, I found myself unexpectedly moved.
The mom lit up with pride when the scholarship was announced in front of her family. But she wasn't showered with congratulations by her husband. Instead, he icily declared, "That isn’t going to happen.”
End of discussion.
In a voice over, the mom claimed that the final decision--to turn down the offer--was hers, but she didn't fool anybody. The power dynamics in their marriage was exposed. And it wasn’t pretty.
In 2008, how many mothers have stayed at home because their husbands have decreed this is the way it will be?
I’m looking forward to cracking open my copy of Carpool Diem, Nancy Star's comic novel about the life of soccer moms.
After this show, I could use a dose of humor.

Labels: soccer moms

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